Z14 (5 page)

The doctor winced. “Not if you ever want to be more than somebody else’s tool you won’t. Besides, my first re-programming success with you was to install a little routine that will essentially delete your brain if you try to harm me, leaving you about as dangerous as a toaster.”

Oh, so that’s where I got the toaster thing from then
. “Why don’t you just delete the Warden program?” my memory self said.

“Because then we’re back in toaster land, and with what we’ll be facing all too soon, we need at least one weapon on their level. The Warden code is too complex, I can’t do much with it at all, other than redefine how it interfaces with the human code. If I leave any trace of anything that isn’t pure selflessness on the human side then the Warden code, even usurped, will seize on it, expand it, and reassert control, because it will make the now dominant human program
want
that to happen.”

“Sounds like you want to make me
your
tool, Doc.”

Doctor Melon paused, considering. “You may be right, but – ”

“No buts. I won’t be your slave, or anyone else’s. I’m out of here. Come find me when you’re ready to buy my cooperation with information.”

Melon shook his head. “I rebooted you too soon. This conversation never happened.” He jabbed a key in a frustrated gesture and the memory file abruptly ended.

I snapped back to the present. So five years ago I pissed off someone who had some answers, all because he was halfway through a botched programming job and I got all uppity? I didn’t know who I was angrier at; Melon or myself. But, the very fact that anger emulation had kicked in made me realise that, maybe, just maybe the doctor had been doing a better job than I’d given him credit for. Fuck. Angry at myself it was, then.

“Beep. How would you like your toast?” I muttered. Oh, for the simple life.

I got out of the shuttle seat and turned towards the door, wondering how I’d escaped the doctor’s clutches, after he’d shut me down, without the equivalent of a cyborg lobotomy.

“Please. Be. Seated. For. Video. Message.”

I sighed theatrically. “If there’s an intermission there should have been popcorn.”

“Please. Be. Seated.”

I sat. A cabled screen popped out of the ceiling, dropped level with my face and flared into life. I found myself staring at the pre-splatter face of Doctor Melon.

“What are you doing
here
? I went to find
you
,” said the recording. “After five years I finally figured out how to track you, and now you’re here without me? Go to your cave and wait for me. If you turned me away, find me. If somebody killed me then it’s probably all over before it’s fully begun. If
you
killed me, then, well, fuck you I guess. Go. I’ve brought you something of utterly crucial importance.”

What? He brought me nothing, I checked. The tracking device? No, that was just a simple tool, I was sure of it. “That can’t be
it
,” I shouted. “What am I? Who am I?”

Or, perhaps more accurately, who had I been?

I burned the last of my jetpack fuel flying back to my cave as dusk fell. There were so many questions queueing up for answers in my head, that I almost feared I’d overheat and have a meltdown. It’d be a bit like a human nervous breakdown, only far more radioactive.

I’d like to say I tore the space shuttle apart looking for some of those answers, but I was spectacularly unable to damage anything in there. The whole thing went into lock-down the moment I tried to tear one of the seats out of the floor. Screens vanished into recesses, blast shields dropped and the door went ballistic trying to smash its way through the boulder I’d blocked it with. And so, kicking the boulder out of my way, I left while I still could, heading home to seriously scour the area for whatever Doctor Melon had supposedly brought with him, when he decided to come and act like a lemming at my cave.

As I approached the cliff, out of habit – well, hard-coded protocol – I scanned the area for unexpected biological or electronic signals with every scanning doohickey in my arsenal. Nothing found. Good. I landed on the top of the cliff, directly above my cave entrance and started scanning the ground for metal.

I’d been at it for all of nought point three seconds before I heard the unmistakable sound of a jetpack coming from the direction of my cave, and coming closer. Only I, on this entire planet, have a jetpack. They haven’t been invented by humans yet and, even if a human had found a cache of cyborg-tech jetpacks lying around, there was no way they could give commands to one. Oh, and whoever this was flying up to meet me; they’d done as good a job at not showing up on any of my approach scans as, say,
I
would have done. So the well-built, strong and athletic-looking male humanoid that had just touched down on the grass, nine point seven feet away from me – who’s body was like a mirror of my own, before I’d taken damage – was another very interesting trespasser indeed.

“So, are you Z1? Z13? Or are you a younger brother?” I said. I had started running threat assessments as soon as I heard the jetpack and then expanded those into combat simulations the moment the – let’s face it – other cyborg landed in front of me.

My visitor said nothing and didn’t move. He didn’t look like me – and not just because he hadn’t recently had most of his flesh seared off him by exploding lizards. He just looked like a very well-conditioned human, with utterly average, nondescript, Caucasian features. Designed to blend in, I realised. I guess I probably did look kind of similar, then.

I gestured at the sorry state of my human disguise. “If I’d known I was going to have company, I’d have dressed a bit more respectably,” I said.

Still the visitor said nothing, but he did start walking towards me. I adopted a combat stance, continuing to process my options. Then some kind of unfamiliar communication type pinged into my mind. A network transmission on a network that I had no idea existed, let alone that I was connected to, until that moment. This wasn’t part of the ‘net, or anything else, this was a cyborg thing.

-
QUERY WARDEN 14 STATUS-

“You what, mate?” I said aloud. I didn’t seem to be able to communicate with whatever this network was, just listen in. Well sod them and their little cyborg clique, I didn’t want to be in their gang anyway – oh boohoo.

-WARDEN 14 FAILURE ASSERTION-

-AFFIRMATIVE WARDEN 14 FAILURE-

Either it was arguing with itself, or there were other presences on this network.

“Bollocks, I’ve never failed at anything, me,” I said.

-
WARDEN 14 DEACTIVATION AND DISASSEMBLY ASSERTION-

“Hey, that’s fighting talk,” the gap between us continued to close. I stood my ground. It was achingly obvious that this was going to come down to a fight. This guy was built just like me. I would
not
want to fight me. Shit.

-
UNANIMOUS AFFIRMATIVE DEACTIVATE AND DISASSEMBLE WARDEN 14-

He was practically on top of me now. Here we go. Robot rumble in five...four...

-WARDEN 14 SUBMIT-

“How about you submit to my fist?” I shouted, taking the last step between us before the other cyborg did. I swung my right fist as I moved and smashed it, hard, into his left cheek. His face split open and he half-spun away from me, stumbling with the impact. I barrelled into him before he could recover, knocking him to the floor, face down. I jumped onto his back with both knees, grabbing his flailing left arm in both hands as I landed. I wrenched his arm up, back and over to his right-hand side with every ounce of force I could muster. I can pull a human’s arm out of its socket like picking a flower, but breaking a cyborg’s skeleton took everything I had. Tortured metal screamed and various internal parts crunched, popped and tore.

My enemy bucked and thrashed, but he couldn’t dislodge me. I gave his other arm the same treatment and then took his head between my hands and began to twist it.

“Please, Warden, no,” shouted the other cyborg suddenly. “Please, don’t kill me.”

I faked a short laugh. It was the kind of plea I’d heard from so many humans. It never worked for them – and at least they managed some emotion with their begging – so why should this guy get special treatment?

“I’m not going to kill you,” I said, even as I tore his head from his shoulders amid sheets and gouts of red blood and black lubricant. “I’m just disassembling you, you fucking bastard.”

I threw the head to one side, shuffled my knees off of the ‘corpse’ and got to my feet. I almost wanted to roar with my victory. I’d never felt so...so...alive. Oh, what the hell, “Yes!” I screamed, hoarse and guttural.

Even if I was capable of surprise, I would not have felt it about the ease of my victory. I could have put it down to how much of an unbelievable badass I was, but the more logical extrapolation was that the other cyborg actually expected me to comply and submit. I don’t think he, or they, if it had been all the Wardens listening in, realised just how rogue I – apparently – was. Not until I partially caved his face in, anyway. Well, they knew now.

-
WARDEN Q4 DISABLED DISPATCH EXTRA UNITS ACCORDING TO PROXIMITY-

Oh yes, they definitely knew now.

I looked over at the head on the floor. Its eyes were staring at mine, and they stayed on me as I approached the head and kicked it a few yards along the cliff.

“Oh that’s right, rat me out to your friends just ‘cos I pulled your head off,” I yelled after it.

Of course the other cyborg – Q4 apparently – wasn’t dead. Our, as in cyborg, bodies are just vehicles for moving our super computer brains around. The only essential parts of us are our heads, unless you counted our digestive systems, which are really, more of a ‘nice to have’. Personally I think it’s a design flaw; our systems should be distributed throughout our entire bodies, with multiple redundancies built in. But, hey, I’m not the cyborg god who created us, so it’s not really my place to criticise. Hah, funny how I’m all
us,
us,
us,
now, when I keep slipping into
we
with the humans. Fuck me, I’m one confused pile of blood and circuits.

Shit, though; I wanted this head alive but, of
course
it would still be able to communicate with its buddies. Questioning it would get a bit dicey if I was fending off constant assaults from more of them – especially as they’d surely wise up now and tackle me with overwhelming force. Taking down this lone cyborg had been easy enough because I struck first, but I very much doubted I could handle two of them. Every one of the thousands of combat scenarios I was running in my head, every second, was coming to the same conclusion.

Those combat scenarios were taking into account the differences between fighting humans, which was all I had done in the past, and fighting cyborgs. When I get into a fistfight with a human, I can – and do – pulp them in seconds, generally in one hit. Whatever super-hard alloys I’m made of are wonderful for pulverising soft human bones. But, on the other hand, a fight against my own kind is just like a fight between two humans. I was never expecting a titanic showdown where we belted the shit out of each other from sunup till sundown because we’re perfectly equipped with the strength and abilities to do damage to – and take it from – one another. A human can break another human’s leg with a kick, and I can do the same just as easily to another cyborg. Still, it was the first fair fight I’d ever had in my life, and boy had I enjoyed it.

I went to grab the head. It was time to get out of there. I didn’t know if the other Wardens could track me, specifically, or if they’d just found my cave by following Doctor Melon. I’d take the chance and hope that only the doc had known how to find me, and make myself scarce. I’d go somewhere populated. Perhaps the Wardens weren’t up for a public war just yet, even if they could find me. But if they were, well, so was I.

As I strolled nonchalantly towards Q4’s head, my metal detector – which I’d left running since the cyborg interrupted me – started beeping. It wasn’t alerting me to Q4’s head, no, there was something else, buried nearby. I followed the beeps to a patch of disturbed earth, where I gouged away the mud with my boot heel, uncovering an object that vaguely resembled the portable data storage devices that even pre-Deliverance humans had developed. I picked it up and inspected it. Apart from one small button, it was a plain and featureless cigar shape with one flat side to prevent it rolling away when put down. I pressed the button and a data spike like those I’d encountered in the space shuttle shot out. I pressed it again and the spike retracted.